August 11, 1979

Dan,

I'm writing this after you hung up on me a few minutes ago. Honestly I was only calling to see how you were getting on--I wasn't going to do anything so crass as to suggest that we meet, but I understand now that it comes to the same thing. You don't want to hear from me, don't want anything to do with me, who knows for how long. Maybe for a few weeks, maybe permanently. Fine: I can live with the uncertainty. After all what in God's name have I been living with for the past few years? It's been one long question mark, one endless pregnant pause, one long waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think you'll forgive me if I say I coped with the endless anticlimax admirably. To hell with the false modesty: I was superb at it, dammit. What I don't seem to be coping so well with, what I don't seem to be good at, is dealing with the denouement, the final dropping of the other shoe, which this may well be.

But if it's the end, it's the end; I'll figure out how to deal with it somehow. After all I deserve nothing less. It would be pure poetic justice if it turns out that the event that seemed most likely to bring us together at last would be the thing that drives us apart for good. It would be fitting. It would be just. And if I had a shred of honor in me I wouldn't be second guessing the fittingness of it by rambling on self-indulgently to you the way I am now. I'd close my mouth, withdraw into the shadows, and wait like some patient disembodied spirit, some Eurydice, for you to make a motion to me and say: come. Or else for you to turn away and say: go. I wouldn't call--ever again. I'd disappear for good.

But here's the thing. (I know you've probably torn this up by now, so it's probably useless to say it. But my hand is continuing to guide the pen across the paper despite myself, so I'll say it anyway.) I love you. It's true. I do. And never has what I feel for you been as strong as during this last month, when you've been suffering so much, suffering for her. I ache for you, I truly do; I would do anything to make things a little less bleak for you, to lighten the darkness hanging over you just a little. At the same time I wouldn't dare to come between you and your grief just now. I wouldn't dare open the door on this dark place where you've shut yourself away from me. I want you to mourn for her, I want you to grieve. And if it turns out that this mourning ends up taking away all the savour of what we had, if it makes it seem a foolish, indecent but not wholly discrediting episode in what was actually a long happy marriage--something to wince over from time to time, something that causes you an occasional but not a lasting pain--then I accept that. I accept it. I want it, in fact, if that is what helps you get through this.

But if not: I'm here. That's all I'm really writing to say. I'm here. And if you don't want me then I won't be here. That's all. So you see I am a little like some patient, ghostly Eurydice after all, now that I've had my say, of course. You wouldn't expect me to withdraw into the shades without delivering some final harangue, would you? But now that I have, I'm through. You'll hear nothing from me from now on but silence.

Unless you call me, of course.

Margot