Tues. July 28, 1992

Dear Jean,

Dan and I are up at the lake house until mid-August: bliss! No phone, no television, no radio, even, though Dan did bring along some ancient tape recorder to listen to Telemann and Bach cassettes in the mornings while he's working (very tinny and staticky--I don't know how he can stand it). No unwanted interruptions from Saskia stopping by to narrate the latest Herman saga and then invite herself to dinner (and get unpleasantly drunk on our box wine--she's gotten in the habit of refilling her glass without asking); no hectoring letters from Dan's mother about Aunt MaeMae, who is in a period of religious mania just now (but when hasn't she been?). Just cool mountain air, morning swims in the lake followed by a few hours in my studio, a nap in the afternoon, drinks at five on the deck, dinner, early to bed. A walk sometimes to Talbot's General Store down at the other end of the lake, sometimes a meal with this peculiar couple who lives a mile down or so (the woman with the crow--I've told you about her). What can I call it but bliss?

It hasn't been all enchantment, I'm afraid. Mary Renfroe rumbled in last week as she had threatened to do in the company of her boyfriend, a shaggy near-illiterate ruffian of a boy with frizzy dreadlocks and body odor so intense my temples would start throbbing when I got within eight feet of him. Tattoo of a spider web on his back and several gold teeth. Called me ma'am fifty times a day, evidence of his fine upbringing in Moultrie or Cusseta or some such delightful place in South Georgia. To tell you the truth that got on my nerves more that the _smell_--I have never gotten use to southern folderol and smiling laying-it-on-thick mama's boy mannerliness: so tiresome. At any rate he's a a delightful catch, and absolutely par for the course for Mary Renfroe, who has, shall we say, unconventional taste in men. Did I ever tell you about Kevin, the religious studies major who took a vow of silence during Lent one year and then came up with Mary Renfroe to visit us one weekend? Actually it made things wonderfully simple--conversation was limited to do you want me to pass the salt and the like. Can you imagine if he hadn't been mute and treated us to disquisitions on Bonhoeffer and Barth, as he apparently was liable to at the drop of a hat? That would have been agony. But at least he was mildly attractive, in a clerky sort of way. This present fellow--Dalton, I think--has no physical charms to speak of, just a kind of simian animality. I can't imagine what Mary Renfroe sees in him. To me this fling or whatever it is is simply an exercise in sheer perversity, sheer willfulness, sheer self-defeating cutting-off-her-nose-to-spite-her-face determination to saddle herself with the most unsuitable boy imaginable. Well, maybe the sex is hot.

But actually their visit didn't turn out to be quite the nightmare it promised to be when they first roared up in his station wagon, a backfiring horror of a vehicle that they are proposing to drive up up to the Blue Ridge mountains to camp out with some friends of Mary Renfroe's from that ritzy school she attended. I don't think they'll ever make it, but if they do maybe the friends can talk some sense into her: someone must, and I never have been able to. The first night, true, they treated us to a session of noisy lovemaking in the guest bedroom that literally had me blushing--I could feel my face burning in the dark! It felt positively indecent, vaguely incestuous, even, to have to listen to it. (Dan claims to have slept through it--liar.) This is how it must have been when we all lived in grass huts and caves: listening to the grunting and groaning and intimate keening of your nearest and dearest in the next bed, or next hammock or animal fur pile or whatever. But then the next morning Dalton did help out Dan clean out his boat, which has been needing it forever, and he even managed to get the lawnmower in the shed out back working and volunteered to mow the grass by the dock. And while he was doing manly things with Dan outside Mary Renfroe helped me make lentil soup.

At first things were quite icy and tense--the girl can sulk like nobody's business, and she was in a state of glum, dolorous Weltschmerz that day due to some quarrel with Dalton (maybe just post-coital tristesse)--but once we got to chopping vegetables she warmed up and suddenly we were laughing with that gleeful, totally out-of-the-blue silliness that sometimes used to overtake us in the midst of our worst quarrels years ago. She was telling me about Dalton's odd sexual proclivities (apparently he actually likes to be spanked, which seems so quaint and old-fashioned nowadays, doesn't it?) and how he doesn't know his multiplication tables or who the vice president is and thinks Ireland is in Russia or something. But very smart with mechanical things. She knows it won't last. Then why are you with him? I had to ask. Because he's nice to me: that was her response, can you believe it? She said she'd never had a boy be so courteous, so gentle, so nice to her. I said sure he's nice--they're always perfectly _nice_, that type, even when they're beating you black and blue and lynching blacks and burning crosses and whatever else they do. Perfectly impeccable down-home manners all the while. Not the most politic thing to say, I'm afraid; it brought back her sulkiness with a vengeance. Margot, you know he's not like that, she said frostily. And when she turned to put some chopped carrots in the pot--her face was sort of turned to the side--she looked so much like Patricia it nearly took my breath away. Patricia could get terribly lofty on you in the same way Mary Renfroe can, insufferably aloof in a kind of martyred, nun-like, reproachful, wounded way, as if you'd insulted a saint. But mainly it was her looks--with her hair cropped short and with all the weight she's lost she looked startlingly like Patricia did during her last spate of illness, a gaunt Maria Falconetti with henna-colored hair, if you can imagine that. And of course instantly I began wondering, as I always have, whether she knew about Dan and me when her mother was sick. You know this now; it won't be a shock to you, I'm sure, but the marriage was falling apart, and Dan was about to leave her when Patricia got sick. And then he stayed with her until the end. Few people know that about Dan, and what he went through for her--his children, I think, least of all.

At any rate all's well that ends well. They left the next morning after a midnight swim in the lake--very imprudent, with those rednecky people across the lake getting drunk and zooming back and forth in their motorboat, and then Mary Renfroe and Dalton were both pretty tipsy too on this godawful Everclear stuff they brought. But breakfast was cordial--I made blueberry pancakes--and our farewells were sincere and heartfelt: I think they did enjoy their stay, and Mary Renfroe actually kissed me before getting in the car, something she hasn't done since she was twelve, I think. And Dalton did improve a little on acquaintance, or maybe it's simply that one inevitably succumbs to that leaping puppy-dog gregariousness and eagerness to please, no matter how much one tries to resist it. And he has a lovely complexion--I hadn't noticed that before. Just the smoothest, most flawless, babyish skin underneath all that dirt and tattoos. When he was bending over to put his knapsack in the trunk I could see how downy and soft it was on the back of his neck.

Since they've been gone, the bliss has returned, but it's been a tremulous haunted bliss, shot through with sudden troubling memories and occasional shadows. I'm doing watercolors again--something about this milky mountain mid-summer light always makes me reach for them. It's an eerie, gauzy light, especially in the early mornings; you always think the haze is about to part and reveal to you something, something epiphantic and final, and you're not sure whether you want to see it or not. But you keep looking for it. You do.

An unforgivably solipsistic letter, obviously--I won't ask for pardon. Just write me an equally solipsistic and self-centered letter in return, please, telling me all about the Baltic trip--I'm eager to hear. Oh and Elizabeth's recital, and the orchids; I'm so envious of you, for mine invariably die. Did you bring me back a fragment of amber perchance? I shall be eternally grateful.

Dan, who's doing just fine, fifty-two and fit as a fiddle after his angioplasty last April, sends his love and regards.

Love,

Margot