A Pen Pal Monologue

He recalls sending Pearl for milk and, when she brought back only water, cursing her for her indolence. She’d say, “It’s on account of me lame foot,” and he’d say, “Cut it out with the ridiculous accent and boil the damn stuff for tea.” Here they were playing this game again, he bilious, she flippant, as if they didn’t like each other, as if they’d been forced by exigency to marry, as if the identity of one weren’t inextricable from that of the other.

As if one would continue to live once the other had died.

When Pearl passed away, Leonard continued to live, but it was only by a small margin that he managed it, because for some time afterward he felt the greatest sensation upon awakening that he had not breathed a single breath all night, and so had to swing his legs over the bed and struggle for air with his head in one hand and his chest in the other, his heart in his throat, and the tears in his eyes mixing agony with asphyxia, until at last he’d remember the state of things, and then his heart would sink, allowing his throat to open and his lungs, beleaguered, to sag and pout with the weight of air.

So morning after morning Leonard was left to fetch his own milk, until he couldn’t, and boil his own water and lay his own tea for a table that had been much too small for two, now much too large for one. He was sentimental about it by not being sentimental about it. He would say, “She was a polecat, a waster, a real hussy,” and in this way he continued the game that they’d kept up for these last few decades.

This went on unperturbed for a handful of years and, when Leonard had ceased all contact with the outside world, except for the daily visits from the housekeeper, Colleen, a stolid woman of forty whose face already sat and hung like bark, he began to invent other characters besides Pearl, most based loosely or closely on people from his past, and thus he populated a lonely world with a palatable but not uninteresting milieu of acquaintances and events.

This precipitated an unnoticed change from speaking of people in the past tense and the third person to speaking of them and to them as if they were present, so that at his morning tea, for example, Leonard would say to Pearl, “You are a polecat, a real waster, a hussy,” and pour the steaming tea for two.

And in this way Leonard survived the death of his wife, who for thirty-six years had been to him like oxygen, essential but mostly unnoticed, warm, and at times thrilling; who, when gone, had become the most tangible thing in his world, thick, pasty, grotesque, like a daily dose of cod-liver oil; and who, once returned, in consequence of her brief absence, became all the world to him and an accomplice in the savagery of his dementia.

It never consciously occurred to Leonard that in resurrecting Pearl in his mind, she’d resurrected him in spirit. Though his body continued to waste away, his will to live grew sharper through the wit and vivacity of his conversation with Pearl and the distinguished guests they invited to tea.

Pearl had changed to a degree after her death, too, so that she no longer eschewed the monotonous tasks of entertaining guests, which inevitably fell to her (while of course the doctor was busy reading). Now she rather enjoyed putting the leaves in the table or arranging a new vase of flowers from the garden for the centerpiece. She even began ordering white porcelain teacups by mail and decorating them with bright little scenes from her childhood in the Alps: first a series of thatched-roof cottages, then a stand of Aspens lined with grass and wildflowers, then a smudgy little duo holding hands on one cup, marrying under a canopy on another, seen through a candle-lit window from outside their cottage on the third, and on the fourth, which made Pearl chuckle with the irony of it, pushing up timid, but cheerful, daisies.

Leonard and Pearl began entertaining friends from the local community whom they’d known for some time. They were no classists, but they ensured to invite only the respectable as they, too, were respectable: the one a doctor, the other a matron of sorts to the town, of unsung but multiple talents, including painting, as mentioned, and with the kind of humor that undoes and softens the most querulous, the most taciturn.

It was not long, though, before the renown of their little gatherings began to spread, and soon enough their invitations gave way to numerous requests from acquaintances and strangers alike to call on the couple at its earliest convenience.

Among these was the distinguished Dr. Helen Middleton, whose research in the field of nuclear power and its dangers was heralded by liberals and conservatives alike. Leonard, himself an emeritus professor of mathematics at Kings College, Cambridge, having wide interests had read her books once or twice and, though he found her tone too alarmist to be credible, respected her work nonetheless and liked her face (as seen from the inside flap of the dust jacket), with its none-too-aquiline nose, which suggested a congenial, if slightly tragic, worldview. It was based on these factors that, after consulting with his wife, he accepted her request to come to tea.

She brought Kip, her poodle, and WaWa, her mini-schnauzer, because she could not find a sitter. Her relationship with Kip and WaWa was such that she could not leave them home alone, not for their sakes, though, but for her own. This tickled Leonard no end; he felt superior in his independence. And when they settled in at her feet under the table, droopy and nonplussed by the drudgery of human social life, this hardly being their first errand or appointment of the day, he nudged them several times with his sock for even the smallest reaction, which is all he got from either of them.

Ms. Middleton introduced and excused her dogs with one practiced sentence: “Professor and Mrs. Williams, this is Kip and WaWa Middleton, your smallest biggest fans.” And then she swooped into the chair indicated and just slouched slightly, as if ambivalent about where she’d rather be, among her hosts or nuzzled on the ground with the dogs.

Unlike most of their conversations, Pearl led this one, owing in part, perhaps, to the fact of a shared alma mater and to the compliment that Ms. Middleton had paid Pearl’s teacups. She’d said, “What fine coloring, but it’s the drama of the scene, here with the couple sipping tea through the lighted window, caught forever in mid-sentence or mid-gaze, not unlike the poor, intrepid lovers of Keats’s Grecian urn.” She lacked no flair for drama.

And from this point onward during their brief and only engagement, Leonard said very few words, except to comment on some point of history he felt the younger doctor had misconstrued or misapplied, and so the conversation tended away from Ms. Middleton’s research, which was Leonard’s key interest in her visit, to follow a more personal vein.

Pearl said, “The grass of the quadrangle was terribly green and lush. One could hardly resist sitting on it.” They were comparing their experiences at University.

“One was hardly allowed any privilege but that, as a woman,” said Ms. Middleton. “It is unfortunate that there were not shelves of books upon the grass—or instead of it. That would have expanded the women’s library by half at least.” Her accent was very clean and her diction untrammeled. She was in no hurry to prove herself, and this confidence, or languor, along with the feminist conversation festering on the table, irked Leonard so that he jabbed at, instead of nudging, little Kip in the collar.

Kip yelped, but blandly, for the kick with all its vehemence was mild, being attached to an old foot, and Dr. Middleton was unconcerned. For being so infinitely tied to her animals, she hardly noticed them at all. It seemed they were so familiar to Ms. Middleton as to be transparent, like a rock pile, and with that thought Leonard himself forgot them and turned his mind fully back to the conversation, which still festered in minutiae.

Pearl was describing an encounter with a teacher of English literature and Latin, which had taken place upon the lush grass of the quadrangle at the woman’s college. “He wasn’t handsome, to be sure, but something in his air enchanted me. He floated when he walked, did he not?”

“It’s true, he was a heavenly sight, even fifteen years afterward,” said Ms. Middleton. “I thought for sure he’d been married, at least once.”

“Of course, we all did, and at the same time we all hoped he wasn’t, and shied away from his eyes and demurred when he asked us questions. It was all rot, of course, the way we acted, and not a few of us resolved in hindsight that he was the ruin of us as a gender, bringing out as he did all of the stupid, latent fawning that we practiced only under social duress.”

“You might be surprised,” said Ms. Middleton, “that conditions remained altogether unaltered for my generation as well. Wouldn’t you believe it? The man was just shy of fifty and still managed to wrangle the silly and inept out of the brightest student. They say, though, that his end was scandalous.”

“I had heard tell something of disgrace,” said Pearl, who looked away in delight or distress.

“Of course nothing was concluded satisfactorily, and the whole sordid thing, whether true or not, implicated the poor man in a scenario that not even his accomplishments, to say nothing of his grand charm, could contain. I cannot say I know the details of his dismissal, it having occurred some time after my graduation.”

“I do hate to gossip,” said Pearl. She poured everyone more tea and took another cookie. Leonard spied her profile, hoping she’d insist on the narrative. But she did not have to. Helen pushed the tea from her as if making to go and sat up straight in her chair. Kip and WaWa opened their eyes on cue but remained prostrate and languid, familiar with the narrow difference between their mistress’s intentions to exit and her intentions to speak.

“I say this in the strictest of confidences,” she began, though there was only intrigue and nothing of hesitance in her voice. “I may not know of the final affair, but I have had an inkling of the man’s hidden character, which may have led to his demise.” There was no eerie silence, the kind that usually followed such introductions, thanks to the frenetic crunch of a cookie in Pearl’s mouth and a syncopated belch from Leonard that went willfully unnoticed. But the audience was rapt all the same, and Ms. Middleton continued. “After a paper of mine on Milton placed first in the annual essay competition, Professor Wasserman invited me to luncheon as a gesture of congratulations. I was, of course, unnerved and the envy of all the girls. This was not just a move to treat me—a woman and a student—as an equal, albeit a young and untested one, but also a devilish, contemptible snub of university decorum. It was marvelous, and I dressed as best I could for it.”

The clock struck some hour. WaWa raised his head and blinked.

“I arrived on time wearing this muslin thing that wasn’t at all pretty, but clean, pressed and the best I had. I wore heels and lipstick, and I had a girlfriend put my hair up to show my neck off to advantage, but my nerves were so taut that I sweat like a pig and reddened like an apple. I arrived just shy of the hour appointed and knocked. Wasserman lived in a heavy-set building with columns that were either stately or intimidating, not both, and a stoop to outdo the ostentation of Buckingham Palace itself. But it had a silly little fern that hung about as if embarrassed, and it was while my attention was drawn to it, with my back to the door, that he answered.

“He invited me in, and as I crossed the threshold I stepped into the heavy smell of unwashed linen. The dust was oppressive and the light through the window of the drawing room hung upon it. Time seemed to hang, too, and no words passed between us. It was as if there were a tacit understanding of my presence, but it was namely that sensation which perplexed me.”

“Well he must have spoken! He ought to have said something, oughtn’t he? He was always unfailingly dexterous with words!” said Pearl.

Leonard hmphed, but it was a sound intended to discourage interruptions, not to pass judgment. In the painting of this man he saw something of himself or, rather, something of what he wished he’d been: more of the romantic, less of the choleric. He had been in situations before that weren’t unromantic, but they certainly weren’t sublime, nothing to inspire an avid retelling decades later. Leonard had always navigated life with words—the bigger the better—but here, this man, he put down things in silence and was the more powerful for it.

And even now, in the retelling, Wasserman’s silence changed the room. None but the dogs remained unmoved. Leonard saw that Pearl was as eager as she’d ever been about stirring in her sugar cube—and there, another cube! Light from the afternoon sun made the crystals of the overhead chandelier glow, and when Leonard glanced at Ms. Middleton he noted that the bags under her eyes suggested depth, not age, as he’d thought before, and that her eyebrows were uncommonly stout. She was lean, but not too lean, and articulate without fear of the inarticulate, or the sanguine, or the unclean.

Leonard was struck with the urge to smoke a cigar. If only he’d smoked cigars! He had a rather heavy dinner jacket. He thought of retrieving it, without inventing an excuse for fetching it, knowing he never would. Instead, he took another sugar cube himself.

Ms. Middleton continued, though not before Pearl hurried to refill her cup. Pearl was anxious, and she found relief in busying her hands. She retrieved a third round of cookies for herself and her husband.

“It was I who finally spoke,” and out came a long breath. “It seemed an age that we stood in the entry, with the grimy walls and the old, dark pictures. The weight of the room oppressed me, mixed with the silence, so I moved through to the parlor, across from the drawing room, to comment on a rather classic reading chair, not high-backed, but covered in a rich burgundy. It seemed somehow resistant to the dust that accumulated everywhere else and, once I invoked it, Wasserman invited me to sit and, once I’d sat, paced the floor and began in earnest.

“He said, ‘I invite few people here. I know it is uncivil, but I am not all poppy and poetry. I must close like any flower.’ His face was dark, despite the haze of sunlight, and he did not take my eyes. He brooded, and it was obvious he meant to tell me something that weighed upon him. At any rate, I expected something dramatic and, to be frank, I hoped for it, for at least that would be more in keeping with his character than this initial taciturnity. But he continued in an even monotone, while still pacing: ‘I am to be divested of a rather valuable estate, and though I am not undone, justice be damned, I need a favor to help me weather the disappointment. You have earned the right to an invitation here because of your mind, which I find complex enough to manage surprises, but I invited you here for your face. Please don't go. (I had moved to rise.) Please stay. I ask for nothing more unseemly than your presence at a bachelor’s house and your statuesque bearing, for I am to ask you to sit for me.’”

“He was a painter!” said Leonard, and at the outburst the three of them jumped at once. Leonard nudged Kip again, but inadvertently. He was astounded by the portrait of this man, the very portrait of his own ideal self: charming, handsome, literate, loved, bright in the eyes, but with eyes that hid a secret calling and a melancholic fear—no, knowledge!—that mediocrity and, worse, obscurity, threatened him at every side, least of all from the fading and taming that comes of age, and thus that one’s true passion ought to be hidden from the prying and inane eyes of the public lest it be misunderstood!

Ms. Middleton continued. “‘I am not a painter,’ he said to me, ‘but I am a student of painting, and when I see that shadows are not black but colored it pains me that others do not see it also. You convinced me, when you wrote of Paradise Lost that there was nothing about paradise to mourn but the fact of loss itself, to hope against hope that here, finally, I'd found someone who would not see value in the thing but rather value in the seeing of the thing; that the difference between love and lust is nothing more than the length of time the lover takes to look upon the beloved; that when Wordsworth talked of poetry he talked of something superior to its object but secondary, if that, to the act of contemplating the object. There is no other type of person worth painting and no other type of person willing to be painted.'”

Leonard felt himself sweat. Pearl stood to draw the blinds. The dogs shifted and stretched. Ms. Middleton concluded. “Of course I refused him.”

Pearl spun around to gawk at her, but mumbled, “Of course,” and lowered her eyes. Leonard choked on his tea; he only just managed to contain it in his mouth. Ms. Middleton sat back. She looked older now. There was a preoccupation in her eyes. She was as swept up in her narrative as her audience, only it was entranced by disbelief while she was caught up by regret.

Pearl sat. She yearned to ask why Ms. Middleton had refused Wasserman, but she demurred. Leonard nearly asked for them both, but restrained himself. While Pearl bowed to decorum, Leonard worshiped subtlety for its part in the makeup of the sublime, which also informed his interest in the story, and so he dared not tarnish the inconclusive with a request for more detail. There was, therefore, little left to say, and the party shortly broke up.

* * *

Some months afterward Leonard penned a letter to Ms. Middleton and posted it to her publisher in New York City. He assumed a collegiate air, which seemed appropriate to their profession, and an objective tone that fit his purpose. He rewrote it several times to achieve the allusion of spontaneity and the brevity befitting the indifference of a happily married man.

Dear Dr. Middleton,

It was a charm and a pleasure to make your acquaintance this spring over tea. Pearl and I feel it an honor to have you to tea again when next you’re in the country. In fact, Pearl insists upon it and has begun to pester me about getting a dog or two. She will be pleased to know that your travels were not too taxing and that you’ve now comfortably settled among your own familiar things. It does upset her that people go to such lengths to travel such distances simply to find their home, which (she hastens to say and says it often) is of course all the time in one’s own backyard. You will write when you can, perhaps between one class and the next, to alleviate my darling’s anxiety.

Yours cordially,

Dr. Leonard Williams

Of course at the heart of the letter was an indecent curiosity, but there was also something of the awe, inspired by Ms Middleton’s depiction of Wasserman’s dramatic persona and its obvious influence, of the romantic sublime.

And now, when Pearl went out, Leonard asked of her not only the milk and water, but also a pack of cigars, the cheaper the better. When she was out, and increasingly when she was home, too, he settled in the parlor, which he refused to have dusted, closed the drapes (or had Colleen close them) and took to wearing his dinner jacket.

The jacket was made of wool but, while technically white, it bore an artful grayness not unlike the silver in the hair of slender men with fine posture. He’d actually gotten married in it, lacking the means or the ostentation for a bona fide tuxedo, but he’d given up wearing it—had actually forgotten about it—around the time he’d given up society altogether, just prior to retirement. It made things awfully hot in the summertime and not quite warm enough in the winter (Leonard’s pension was robust enough to keep him in coal), but in the spring and in the autumn it was matchless, and the feeling that, finally, he was tapping something of the poet in himself, or of the dormant painter, after these years of pragmatic self-sacrifice, was worth any discomfort.

True, Pearl did not like it, all of it being quite uncharacteristic of Leonard, and their plans for tea and the tea parties themselves suffered from his moods, which he shifted unpredictably as required by the romantic ethos. But his relationship with Pearl did not suffer any serious setbacks. Besides, Pearl was not jealous by nature. And, after all, she was the wife, while Ms. Middleton was nothing but a passing fancy, a mere acquaintance—and one miles away at that—with whom Leonard shared a degree of professional intimacy, and in whom Leonard had nothing but an academic interest. She was like any colleague, and his pursuit of her via post was nothing more than his own well-groomed pursuit of knowledge.

As the purveyor of the romantic hero, Dr. Middleton held important information for Leonard, and so he sought the narrator of the brief, but epic tale of Dr. Wasserman, which grew, the more Leonard reviewed it in his mind, in passion, sensuality, sublime irreconcilability and, what’s more, personal significance. It was as if Ms. Middleton had been speaking solely to him, her body taut in the chair, and for his benefit alone.

In light of these facts, he expected soon to receive a letter from Ms. Middleton and then, in his own response, to call Ms. Middleton by her given name, but when he received no reply to his first letter, despite remarkable patience, he penned another, this one less measured, less staid, with a touch of the poetic that she’d awakened in him, and posted it a year to the day of the previous.

Dear Dr. Middleton,

It has been some time since your last visit, but the counting of what’s past hardly stands to the counting of the time that remains to elapse until the rap of your knuckles at the door, your elaborate entrance, and the sound of your light but significant steps on the linoleum.

I am reassured by the vehemence of the blossoms on the cherry tree that, if you make your trip soon, you will be greeted with more than mere tea and cookies.

You will also find the host somewhat changed, if not his house, and your reception, I rush to assure you, will not fail to remind of another occasion, when other, earlier cherry trees were in bloom and the romance of the quadrangle at Oxford was not just a radiant memory.

And though you, my dear professor, I hardly count as a simple radiant memory, I hold that memory close to me and its radiance warms my heart. You will come soon, and if you will not come soon, you will write soon, and if you will not write soon, then I will.

With gratitude and a measure of impatience, your,

Dr. Leonard Williams

P.S. Pearl sends her love, too.

In the interim between the posting of the letter and its receipt, between the receipt of the letter and its reading, between its reading and its rereading, between its rereading and its answer, and between its answer and the speedy fulfillment of its request, Leonard reread Dr. Middleton’s books. She was not uninspired, he decided. Moving, even, and what before had seemed dowdy or urbane in its politicism now felt vivacious and poignant, though not without a proper dose of professional restraint. There was passion in these words, and Leonard read them more and more as if they were written to him. In lieu of the letter that did not come, these words turned into the personal expressions of an untamed spirit and the lava of its sensual heart.

He had always wondered how activists did it: from what source they derived their dogged insistence, their sense of social responsibility, and their vehemence, which to Leonard had always seemed so vulgar. Before, there had always been an order to life, and this order and the routine that attended this order had always soothed Leonard. Now it irked him, and he found that even Pearl, not without a measure of gaiety herself, was altogether too industrious and predictable.

It was in this altered state of mind that Leonard, moved by a passion better suited to the impetuosity of youth and by the inexplicable neglect of Dr. Middleton in her role as pen pal, began to invent facts that he thought might induce a response from the object of his desire. No sooner did he invent them, however, then he began to believe them.

He wrote of his mother, long dead, as if she were spending an unexpected renaissance of thought in a small room on the French Riviera. He dared not write that she was putting out the best poetry of her life—he feared that he’d fail to create poetry fine enough to corroborate his claim—but he gave no thought to ascribing to her mind great gifts of intellect, including a prescience not unlike that of Cassandra, the cursed oracle of Greece. He would not be surprised to find, he wrote, that she’d simply disappeared one day, having lighted upon a cloud or something and floated up to heaven.

He wrote also of the States and how, having now studied their history at some length, he’d lost some of his previous, but understandable, prejudice of them and was thinking, though of course with appropriate reserve and pragmatism, of making a visit. Perhaps, he wrote, he might call on the lady in upstate New York, where she purportedly lived, or somewhere more suitable to both parties, assuming her consent.

He was, of a truth, a great lover of classical music, thinking anything other a cheap trick, and found at once an expression of his passion and solace for its inertia in the performance of Arthur Rubinstein on the piano. There was nothing, he insisted in his letters, like Chopin’s nocturnes, and again nothing like Chopin’s nocturnes under the consummate and delicate care of Rubinstein’s genius.

Another year passed and still no reply. Leonard was getting on in age and Pearl, whose first death had marked her for life, despite a temporary influx of domestic energy, began to flag in her responsibilities, so that the tea was served tepid and the cookies turned stale more often than not before they could be eaten, and the pictures on the teacups lost their quaintness to the dullness of time and the dimness of Leonard’s eyes. As Pearl began to wilt, however, so Helen bloomed, and the bags under her eyes, whatever they had seemed to Leonard before, disappeared altogether, as also did the gray of her hair and the sulfur, however faint, of her breath.

He wore nothing now but his dinner jacket, threadbare and stained, a shabby pair of trousers and a pair of indiscernible slippers, even to bed, and he took very little time to do anything, for he had none; it was all reserved for Helen Middleton and the letters he wrote her, some passionate, some vehement, some imploring, and some still incredulous. How can it be, he wrote, that between you and me could have passed something as real as this and yet so much time since that meeting has passed? I dare not think that dear Dr. Wasserman miscalculated his estimation of your mind and of your body. Surely, he did not, for I have witnessed them myself, and if I could (and yet I might!) I, too, would ask you to sit for me, and I would turn your patience into the vigor and meaning of life itself. To that end I have sent Colleen for pencils and paper. I now only lack a sharpener.

* * *

It was in the spring of a year not now long passed that Leonard fell and, failing to get up, acquiesced. Pearl had recently passed away again, and, with the unbroken silence of Dr. Middleton, Leonard felt his loss doubly. It was, after all, more than he could bear, and he decided that if his time had finally come to die, death hadn’t chosen such a terrible moment. Pearl and he had not received requests to tea in some months now—maybe years—and Leonard was aware, though vaguely, that to begin making invitations in earnest as in the past would prove difficult, all but one of the teacups—the one of the couple holding hands—having fallen from his trembling hands at one time or another and shattered.

So he resigned himself to death, though he feared it. There was, at least, something romantic in the mystery that lay beyond mortality and something sublime in the silence that, if anything, must define death. And so Leonard was reconciled.

And so he lay there, maybe minutes, maybe years, but his heart, beating with a fury as if to sprint to the finish line, remained unsatisfied. It had loved and lost and loved again, and the joke had been in the effort, not the object, of that last love. Leonard had suffered from his passion and suffered from its unfulfillment, and now, prostrate on the floor not far from where Kip and WaWa had lounged unaffected and bored, he suffered from the cruel faces on the cards that fate had played him, a man already in his dotage.

Indeed, fate had played him.

It had flaunted the specter of sublimity before him in the visage of the charming, brooding Dr. Wasserman and had taunted him with the prospect of taking for his muse a woman as contradictory and distinct as the prim and florid Dr. Middleton. He had written poetry—strict Shakespearean sonnets—to the object of his love, which he yearned to send, but he found that he could no more write poetry than he could overcome the prosaic of his own life, no matter his intent or the power and length of his concentration.

And so when death came, after this eternity of contemplation and a thorough soaking of Leonard in the cold of the linoleum and a mixture of his own sweat and urine, it came calmly, unperturbed and unnoticed, in the night to cheat Leonard of the sublime agony of a painful death. And thus Leonard slipped away, disappointed in his last hope to experience a romantic moment.

Colleen arranged for the wake and the flowers, spent a good deal on a procession of big empty black cars to follow the hearse (reasoning that the dead man would think it stately) and tidied up the house before shutting it down for auction. She found, as she swept and cleaned, a pile of paper-clipped note cards stuffed between couch and couch cushion. She hardly bothered to glance at it, but noted the salutation, “Dear Dr. Middleton,” and a fairly recent date, and so she posted it to the familiar address of the publisher in New York City. It read, with something of the spirit that marks the poetic,

I wrote to you several years ago at your Christian community in N.Y. State, but you never wrote back to me. I wrote again and I might have been too strident, emphasizing your weak points. If I hurt your feelings I am sorry.

Mommy is dying of ovarian cancer. She is 95. (As old as Arthur Rubinstein!)

The energy program which you outline (no air conditioners . . .), is perhaps a bit severe. Perhaps I might argue, as in ordering Chinese food in the past, Can I have one item from column A, and one item from column B?

I do writing therapy: about every other day I write my thoughts (2hrs) with my right hand and my left hand, and then I throw them out. My therapist tells me this gets rid of mental garbage. It helps me cope about mommy.

I have started humor therapy. I got that from Amos Oz. I look at the pictures of Weird Florida and Weird California; it makes me goofy. I am thinking of a pilgrimage to Cabazon, Cal. where the dinosaurs Rex and Dinny are. Cabazon is about 22 miles from Palm Springs.

I noticed that on the picture of your new book you hold out your sinister hand, with the middle finger outstretched.

Bye,

Dr. Leonard Williams

If, by the grace of God, this final letter ever reached Ms. Middleton, she never did respond.