Tiny Points of Life

Failure to Thrive: Act II — Katja and June

June 28, 1963

K.P. Sorenson
1024 W. 109th Street, Apt. 7C
New York, NY 10025

Dearest Katja:

Received your letter of May 3. Sorry for the delay. I have plenty of excuses, all of them having to do with my editor at the Times and his belief that I am able to be in six countries at once. But none of those excuses are worth the ink it would take to explain them to you. Sorry, love. I’m a terrible friend. Let’s leave it at that.

I am freshly back from Berlin. I can now say that I have seen your dashing President in the flesh. He is strangely handsome in person in a way that he is not in two dimensions. He is a confident man, isn’t he? Camelot indeed. But then all of you Americans are confident. Something in the water I suppose. It makes your teeth gleam and your eyes command that other people get out of your way. No, that is too harsh isn’t it? We Brits already own the look that says out of our way. American eyes say Coming through! And let’s be great friends about you getting out of the way! But it means the same thing in my book. America has appropriated our Imperialist air and added a dashing smile and a pixie dusting of youthful naiveté.

In any event, quite a speech. Very well received indeed. I suppose it has made the GDR rather uncomfortable since they are now trying very hard to have us all believe that the wall is an act of love; that it merely seeks to protect its people from anti-socialist inclinations by holding them close. Very close. Imprisonment is an odd way to show one’s love, don’t you think? Cruel really. If they would leave you, then you don’t deserve them in the first place. Locking them up behind a wall of your own fear only proves the point. They think they are husbanding their resources, but a society that is not free can never thrive. Not that the GDR is amenable to such reason, and I should think your president’s speech did nothing to alleviate their concerns.

I am assuming that you watched the speech on television. I dare say you had a better prospect than I did, sandwiched between a bunch of smelly reporters all banging elbows as we scribbled the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.” That line was like a lightening bolt aimed right over the bloody wall at the heart of darling Nikita. The air was electric. A fight nearly broke out between German and American correspondents over whether your president had just declared himself a pastry. I thought it all rather silly. I knew what he was saying and I was more than a little pleased that someone had the starch to reach over the wall and pop the Soviets in the chest. But apparently it was not as silly as I thought. Two days later the German satirists are having a field day with talking donuts.

How are you my dear, Katja? I miss you terribly. It has been too long since I have seen you. How is the new book coming? Do you have a title? Will you send me a draft chapter? I cannot stand how long it takes a novelist to reach the end of things. I could never be a novelist. You know my impatience. But I admire the reach of your imagination and the little boats that you fashion out of even the most ordinary words. When it is done, you must read it to me. It has been too long since I have heard the sound of your voice reading aloud, like the wind pushing against those little paper sails. You must take me sailing again Katja.

Sadly, I am not due to visit New York in the near future. I am off to Rome next week to write something about the new Pope. I hope it’s a fashion piece; so much to write about in that regard and I do so abhor religion. But then, alas, it’s off to South Viet Nam where, apparently, people are unhappy that they’re locking the monks up in prison. So between the Catholics and the Buddhists, I’ve no time to see my favorite Atheist. When can you come to London? I’ve found some wonderful new riding stables. Gorgeous mares. You must come.

I was in a bit of an accident yesterday after my return from Germany. I was riding my bicycle and was struck by a taxi. Not to worry. I am perfectly fine. A scrape on the arm. But the gentleman in the taxi cracked the windshield with his lovely noggin. It was entirely my fault. I was not looking where I was peddling. That taxi driver was very upset and might have lost his temper were it not for the intervention of his injured passenger. So I felt perfectly wretched about it and was strangely disappointed that I did not have more injuries to show for my inattention. Anyway, I’m afraid the passenger did all of the bleeding and all of the apologizing. He insisted on a coffee. I am seeing him tomorrow afternoon. I have every intention of paying. He is a very nice looking man. I suppose if one must crack a man’s skull and buy him a coffee, he may as well be handsome.

I adore you. Kisses.

June

________________________________________________________________________

July 9, 1963

June Cale
c/o The London Times
Correspondent Mail Service
1 Pennington Street
London E98 1XY

Dear June:

I just received your letter of June 28. I suppose I should feel flattered that you can so easily speak to me as though I am a native born American with a claim to dental superiority and politely imperialist eyes. You know otherwise. My people are from Poland and Belarus, where the eyes are much less confident. I have lived in New York my entire life as a naturalized citizen and yet I still have a far greater temperamental kinship with my ancestry than with my adoptive countrymen. I am proud to be here and I am proud to call Jack Kennedy my President (yes, I saw the speech and I too was a Berliner in that moment), but to be perfectly honest, the can-do brashness of my country is exhausting at times. I often feel as though I am writing into a cultural headwind that blows too fast and high off the ground to appreciate detail and nuance and emotional subtext. My editors are too young and full of themselves.

Listen to me. I sound as though I am sixty-eight. I’m only twenty-eight, same as you. And I should be lucky to write as well as so many excellent American authors. I am, as usual, intensely frustrated with this novel. It is not yet what I want it to be. It fights me with every word. You have asked for a title. The working title is “Under the Waterberry” but this thing is so stubborn I may yet change the title to “Bastard!” No, I will not send you a draft chapter. I love you too much to bludgeon you with dullness and amateurish foreshadowing.

I read your piece on Pope Paul VI. Brilliant as always, June. For someone who professes to loathe religion, you have remarkable insight into that mindset, and you write about it without a hint of any of the derision or the biting condescension of which I know you are so capable. I was disappointed that you never mentioned the Papal hats and the shoes or the astonishing lack of originality in the name. We Americans could teach the Vatican a thing or two about sobriquets. Pope Jack I has a nice ring to it, I think.

I was alarmed to learn of your accident. Even knowing that you came through it with barely a scratch, I was shaken to think of how close you came. I have seen you at death’s door before, June. Never again. I will be interested to learn who pays for coffee. Keep me informed. I must protect you and I don’t trust him. (Joking, of course).

I would love to come to London. Or we could rendezvous in Melbourne to visit your father’s ranch. That was such an exquisite trip. I cannot leave anytime soon, but we should plan something.

You ask if I will read to you. I promise that when I am done with this beast of a book, I will read it to you. Of course I will. Everything I write is written for you anyway, June. You know that. Be careful in South Viet Nam. I will worry.

Yours,

Katja

________________________________________________________________________

July 27, 1963

K.P. Sorenson
1024 W. 109th Street, Apt. 7C
New York, NY 10025

Dearest Katja:

Received your letter of July 9. I am now in my third week in Saigon. I think I am to be leaving soon, although the Times has changed my schedule twice already and nothing is certain in this place except for the heat, which is bloody awful. I am writing to you on a small desk in a hotel room only slightly larger that your average loo. I am mostly naked and my feet are in a pan of tepid water that used to float a few cubes of ice. There are no words for this kind of heat. India was never this hot, was it? Have I just forgotten?

I share the room with a young BBC reporter named Lester Moore. As I write, he sleeps on a cot beneath the window wearing a pair of boxers and an expression of loathing, like his upper lip is trying to protect his sinus passage from some hideous odor. Makes me worry what I look like when I’m asleep. I suppose you would know better than anyone, but you are much too kind to tell me that I look like a buffoon when I am unconscious. I will follow your example and keep his slumbering countenance to myself. I call him Les rather than Lester because I am incorrigible and because there is something about the name Les Moore that appeals to me. Poor bastard, Les. It’s only his second assignment outside of England. His first assignment was Toronto. He follows me around Saigon like a lost puppy, tail tucked between his legs, terrified it will be stepped on.

Turns out there is some basis for that concern, actually. A few weeks ago, just after Les and I arrived, a group of American journalists got into a bit of a row with the police. The Buddhist protests have been growing steadily. Apparently they have decided not to tolerate being shot in the street and having their flag banned while the Vatican flag waves in the hot breeze. July 7 was the ninth anniversary of Diem’s inauguration and the Buddhists took the opportunity to stage a massive demonstration at the Chanatareansey Pagoda, in north Saigon. Some of your countrymen, Peter Arnett and Malcolm Brown were taking pictures. Nhu’s Secret Police bloodied Arnett’s nose, knocked him to the ground and began kicking him viciously. They broke his camera to bits. Les and I saw the whole thing. I thought Les was going to run all the way back to the airport. I had to hold on to his belt. I even yelled at him once to act like a reporter, which I very much regret because he is so sweet really. He was justly frightened and I would be lying if I said I did not feel panicked myself, wondering whether the events would escalate like they did in 1955 Patlala. (You are the only good thing that came out of that riot, Katja. I suppose I would do it all over again just to meet you, which makes you more important to me than what I lost in that brutal melee. Sorry. I needn’t have written that last bit.)

In the end, your David Halberstam (NYT) saved the day when he waded into the thick of the little Vietnamese policemen swinging his arms and shouting “Get back, get back, you sons of bitches, or I’ll beat the shit out of you!” Next to the secret police David looked at least forty-five meters tall. It was like watching Godzilla gather the news.

Enough about me. How are you? Are you done with that bloody book yet? It’s been three weeks. Surely that’s enough time to write a novel. Scribble a The End or Happily Ever After and send me the draft. I confess to rather liking the title Bastard for a novel, but perhaps that is only because it sounds like the kind of novel I would write if I had the ability for such an endeavor. Under the Waterberry is much more becoming for someone of your talents. In any event, I’m not sure that even the great K.P. Sorenson could get away with writing the words happily ever after at the end of a book called Bastard.

I suppose there is one more bit of news about me after all. The gentleman whom I nearly killed by bludgeoning his taxi with my bicycle turned out to be quite lovely. He bought the coffee (he was most persuasive in the way he showed up early and paid before I even arrived) and he followed that trick by taking me to dinner all three nights before I left for the Papal catwalk in Rome. His name is Colin Peters. He’s been to Cambridge and he is working in London for a civil engineering firm. We dined together twice upon my return and went to the ballet, which was not nearly as boring as I should have thought. I fear that any man who can convince me to tolerate the ballet could just as ably talk me into marriage. Can you imagine such a thing? I am joking, of course. At least I think I am joking. Good lord. Maybe I’m not joking at all.

In any event, I have promised to take him riding in return and I was pleased that he sounded terrified at the prospect. He has sent me two letters since I have been in South Viet Nam, which is one more than I have received from my dearest friend. So do keep up, old girl. He seems quite determined and I should hate to have to make excuses for you.

Write soon. Kisses.

June

________________________________________________________________________

August 12, 1963

June Cale
c/o The London Times
Correspondent Mail Service
1 Pennington Street
London E98 1XY

Dear June:

I received your letter of July 27. I worry for you in your job. You take such risks. There are so many ways to die and you seem attracted to every one of them. I cannot protect you from here in New York. You’re going to have to exercise some common sense. Avoid steering your bicycle into moving traffic. Stay out of South Viet Nam. Let David Halberstam cover Southeast Asia and you can work as a financial reporter covering Wall Street for the London Times. You can stay with me.

While I am dispensing unsolicited advice, I am also concerned for you in regards to Colin Peters. It is all happening suspiciously fast, June. I am worried that you are about to throw yourself into a situation that will leave you just as lost and helpless as young Les Moore in the sweltering turmoil of Saigan. Wouldn’t it be better to let a platonic friendship develop at a more natural pace? Nothing good can come from rushing. I say this as a slow-writing, long-winded novelist to a quick-witted reporter who is trained to adapt to rapidly changing environments and to commit herself to writing the news at a moment’s notice. Nevertheless, my advice is the same. I worry for you, June. I worry for your heart. I remember well our conversation beneath that shocking full moon in India – that brilliant blue coin above our table on the river – when you told me of how your precipitous inclinations have served you well as a reporter but have only hurt you in matters of love. You told me then that romance should be the blossom on the long stem of a great friendship. You told me to remind you if it ever seemed to me that you had forgotten that lesson.

So I am reminding you. Take care, June. There is no sense in rushing. If this Colin of yours is worthy of your affections, then make him earn your trust.

Come see me. Better yet, tell me when you are available to go away to Melbourne. We can do lots of riding there. As you know, I am not the least bit afraid of horses and I find them more noble than most men. You are free to fall precipitously in love with all of the horses you want.

Yours,

Katja

________________________________________________________________________

September 4, 1963

K.P. Sorenson
1024 W. 109th Street, Apt. 7C
New York, NY 10025

Dearest Katja:

Received your letter of August 12. Having been in London a few weeks I still say a little prayer for the cool air coming in my window in the mornings. It seems selfish that England has all of the lovely mornings and Viet Nam has all of the wretched ones. I’m sure the Vietnamese would all very much disagree with that assessment or, at least, that is what I tell myself when I thank the God in which I do not believe that the humidity is not boiling in my lungs before breakfast.

I am surprised, really, that they have not sent me back to Saigon given the turmoil. You have no doubt heard of the raid on the Buddhist pagodas throughout South Viet Nam. Hundreds dead. Many hundreds more injured and imprisoned. All because the Buddhists had the temerity to want to see their own flag flapping in the breeze during religious observances. There is no question in my mind that it was Diem’s brother, Nhu, who was behind that travesty. The ARVN uniforms were a ruse to put the blame on the army.

My sources are abuzz with all sorts of intrigue that I dare not shovel through the post in such a casual way. Suffice it to say that your dashing Kennedy of Camelot has some interesting choices ahead of him. Lester Moore, my BBC mate, is still in Saigon. Seems he’s finally found his courage. He tells me of concerns that the Diem regime is rather vulnerable to a coup and that your CIA is right smack in the middle of it. Destabilizing South Viet Nam will not do much to help the fight against the godless Communists, now will it? On the other hand, fighting for a Catholic government that has inspired monks to light themselves on fire in the middle of the street cannot seem very satisfying in the greater cause of freedom. I do not envy your President Jack. It all must have seemed so much simpler in Berlin.

This will be a much shorter letter than you deserve. Colin is due within the hour to take me all the way up to Grimsby. His parents have a home by the river he promises will charm me into utter silence. We’ll see about that. I don’t like silence. I’m a reporter. Silence is like starvation. Besides, if his parents meet me as a quiet person, I should feel like a complete fraud. Colin, fortunately, seems to take my incessant burbling in stride. He even claims to like it, a sweet claim not to be believed but which I confess I do believe in my weaker moments. He really is a wonderful man and I count myself lucky for having almost killed him. We have seen each other at least four or five times a week since I have been back. We are beyond the point of pretending this is not a romantic attraction. I cannot say who was the last holdout in that silly charade, him or me. It doesn’t matter, really. We put that particular pretense out of its misery a week ago and we are both excited for it.

I know you worry for me Katja. I love you for your concern. I love you for reminding me of my own moonlit declarations in India. That was such an extreme time in my life. It feels like such a long time ago. Another existence really. I was barely an adult. Everything and everyone had abandoned me. And as I lay dying, you were there to pull me back into the world. Back into the glory of living. The things I said were true at the time. But they were also influenced by the magnitude of my loss and by my keen appreciation for having almost lost my own life. The world was a wonderful place, but it was also a savage place that seemed to care nothing for me. I was on my guard and wanted nothing more to do with love, which I likened to a kind of wild animal that needed to be fully domesticated before it could be trusted. You were the only one I trusted, Katja.

I am now much less suspicious of the world. No. That is very poorly put. I am not less suspicious of the world. I am more accepting of its savagery as unavoidable and I am more trusting in my own capacity to withstand that savagery. I think I have been testing the waters of life all of these years by putting myself into precarious situations and marveling at how I always manage to wake up the next morning. Like it or not we are, each of us, in a relationship with the world; with the life around us; with life itself. Existence courts us, taunts us, threatens us, every minute of every day. And while we can be coy about it, while we can do our damnedest to hold ourselves apart from it, we cannot deny the relationship itself. In the end, we must embrace it, Katja. Even when it threatens to end us. That is the nature of the beast. It is not a beast that can be tamed or domesticated to fetch the paper. With all due respect to the younger version of myself whose words you have so dutifully quoted back to me, if we wait until all of the savagery has been domesticated out of existence before we dare to live, then we will never live. We will never love.

A taxi collision is as good a reason as any to fall in love, Katja. If that seems recklessly precipitous to you then I can only tell you that I am in full agreement. I am throwing myself headlong into something I only partly understand and cannot control. You cannot protect me. I do not wish to be protected.

It’s all a waste of ink, anyway. Colin’s parents are bound to loathe me. I swear like a sailor and I eat like a pig. I had to cut off all of my hair to tolerate the heat in Viet Nam and I look frightful. They’re just as likely to drown their son in the river for making such a horrid choice as they are to serve me tea. Wish me luck.

I do adore you.

June

________________________________________________________________________

October 10, 1963

June Cale
c/o The London Times
Correspondent Mail Service
1 Pennington Street
London E98 1XY

Dear June:

I have received your letter of September 4. Sorry for the delay. Evidently your letter was misdirected. I just received it today.

Allow me to be perfectly blunt about it. The chance that Colin’s parents will not like you is the least of your concerns. Of course they will like you. What is there about you not to like? They will adore you. As I am sure Colin does. That is not the concern. The concern, June, is that you will allow yourself to be seduced by the affections of someone who is not worthy of your complexity as a person. Simplicity is attractive. It is beguiling in its promise of a happy shelter from the storms of living. We are reluctant patriots and distrust political dogma of all stripes. We have each renounced all of the organized religions on similar grounds. But is love, particularly any romantic love whose flag is so hurriedly hoisted, any less a religion? Are its simple promises any less deceptive? Are its revelations, draped in profundity, any less illusory? I think not.

I thought we were agreed on this point. How many discussions have we had on the siren song of romantic love? About the narcotizing affect of sexual attraction? About the blindness of men in need? I am surprised that a single collision with a man in a taxi was enough to completely reverse the trajectory of your thinking. Perhaps you did more than merely scrape your arm.

It is not my purpose to malign poor Colin Peters, nor cast aspersions as to his motives. I am sure he is delightful and honorable as far as he knows his own mind. I cannot see, however, that you have had a real opportunity to know his true depth. You should never surrender yourself to someone whom you do not know and trust to the core. It takes a very long time to really get to know someone. There is but one person in this world that I know and trust enough to accept my surrender. There is only one person whose flag I would salute as my own.

If I recall correctly from your description of a time before we ever met, your relationship with Rajeev (I can never remember the bastard’s last name) lasted three times longer than you have known your Colin. You told me that Rajeev, too, was handsome and considerate and charming. You allowed yourself to be swept away by the newness of his culture and his religion. It was all so intoxicatingly exotic. Had it been possible for you to convert to Hinduism on the spot you would have done so. And what did that impulsiveness get you? Abandoned and pregnant on a continent you did not know and that nearly killed you. Rejeev did his damage before I knew you. I had assumed that you had learned your lesson. I have never known a June Cale under the spell of a Rajeev. Until now.

I worry for you, June. I am sorry to say it, and I do not mean to hurt you, but I do worry. I wish you happiness, of course, but I fear the opposite. I fear the quiet corruption of your life into something that, in a few years time, you will not recognize and no longer love. I fear your isolation behind a great wall of connubial commitment that will only alienate you from the freedom of spirit, and freedom from all conventional allegiance, that is at the heart the person I know so well. You are better than that, June. I see you racing headlong into distraction, away from all nobility of purpose, without which I believe you will never truly thrive as an autonomous person. Is that not too much to compromise?

I wish we were not separated by an ocean. I suspect that if we could discuss these developments face-to-face you would better appreciate my perspective; a perspective that once used to be your own.

Do take care, June. Yours,

Katja

________________________________________________________________________

October 20, 1963

K.P. Sorenson
1024 W. 109th Street, Apt. 7C
New York, NY 10025

Katja:

Regarding your letter of October 10, I am profoundly disappointed in your attitude and your pessimism for me. A stranger reading your words would easily conclude that you do not actually wish to see me happy; that you would rather I be alone and deny my feelings until I am too old and it is too late to act on them. Fortunately, I know you too well, and trust you too implicitly, to believe such a thing. Which leaves me to wonder not whether you meant those words, but why you chose to write them down and shoot them across the Atlantic like so many poisoned arrows.

We are different beings, Katja. As much as I admire you, as much as I owe to you, I cannot be you. You have a novelist’s capacity for solitude. You are like a great blue whale that takes her breath and disappears into the deep unseen by another sole for miles at a time. As far as I can discern, you have almost no life except to work on your excellent novels, meet once a week with your writer’s group, and sit alone in Manhattan delicatessens writing letters to me. You are a young and beautiful woman. I mean that word most particularly. You are brilliant, of course. That is a given. But you are also beautiful to behold. Everybody thinks so. I think so. You should have more in your life, Katja. More diversity. More people. More men. Yes, Katja, men. They are violent and dangerous and selfish and shortsighted and endlessly preoccupied with their own anatomy and all of the other foibles on which we have agreed over the years, but they are not evil. Not always, anyway. They are not unworthy of the challenge. I know you believe that the romantic life is a distraction, and I know that I have agreed with that sentiment over the years, but I believe it is a distraction worth having. I wish to be happy. We all do. Our work, noble or not, is insufficient to that end. To thrive in whatever else we attempt in the world, we must find a corner of our lives that offers us unconditional happiness. Wherever we live, whatever we do, we each need a garden.

I am in love, Katja. I cannot deny it. I have no wish to deny it. I have found a wonderful man who seems to tolerate everything about me that I have always assumed is a liability when it comes to relationships. I must say that love changes a person. When I am with Colin, I am not the restless monkey with press credentials that you like to mock. I am calm; content with my circumstances. You should be glad, Katja, for even you are suspicious of his motives, you must surely approve of his aim. He has convinced me to ask the Times for domestic assignments so that I can stay closer to home. You should be taking comfort that unless London is invaded by the French I will not be reporting from active war zones.

There, you see? Here I am skirting the news, hesitant to tell you because I know it will not be well received, which breaks my heart, Katja, because it is good news and because my first instinct is always to share my good news with you and to imagine your joy at learning it. Enough then. Here it is. Dateline London. June Cale Warms Bun in Oven; Shops for Miniature Clothing Before Slapdash Wedding.

Try to be happy for me, Katja. Your worry about Colin is entirely unfounded, I promise you. Try to trust the world enough to let it be what it will be. The ceremony will be on Friday the 22nd of November at St. Mary the Immaculate in Lincolnshire, which is near Grimsby where Colin’s parents live. It is a beautiful church, abutting a meadow, but with a very stately circle of flags in the front by the fountain that makes it look a bit too much like an embassy. It is unlikely to have been my first choice, but I am much more agreeable now. The wedding will be a very small affair but I would wish for you to attend if you are up to the trip. I know that such could be a tall order for you and I promise not to be offended if you are unable to come. I know, despite it all, you will be there in spirit.

If it is a girl, I am naming her Katja. I mean that. If it is a boy, what do you think of Jack? Or Lancelot? Camelot indeed! Still waiting on any tidbit you deign to fling my way regarding your latest masterpiece. You are quiet cruel to deprive me so.

Kisses,

June

________________________________________________________________________

November 2, 1963

June Cale
c/o The London Times
Correspondent Mail Service
1 Pennington Street
London E98 1XY

Dear June:

I have received your letter of October 20. I write to you not from a Manhattan delicatessen, but from the privacy of my tiny apartment with a view six floors above a narrow, litter-strewn alley where the winos like to sleep and fight and relieve themselves. Directly across the alley is a man sitting at his window. I have concluded that he too is a writer. He is there every day. He does a lot of staring without seeing. His window is almost always closed, but I can hear the keys strike the carriage in my head. He is working on something. I imagine for the sake of convenience that it is an article for some mechanics magazine. A novelist likes to believe she is unique; that she is the only one in the world writing a novel. It hurts us somehow if we are forced to acknowledge that others do what we do. Isolation is all part of it. It helps us live in that other, wholly imagined, world. So it is convenient for me to assume that this man across the alley, the one that I see every day in his window and who sees me every day in my window, is writing an article. If not about mechanics, then maybe about politics. Cartoonist would have been even better, but he is clearly typing, not drawing. He’s always there. Always staring into space.

Having read your letter, I cannot leave this place. I am a prisoner of my own grief and my own shame. I have cried until my throat is raw and my eyes hurt. I do not know what to say, June. I am a writer with no words.

I should never have sent that last letter. Or, at least, I should have expressed myself differently. You are right. You know me too well to think that I do not wish you every happiness. I do. Wherever you find it and with whomever you choose, I do wish you happiness. My concerns about the suddenness of your romance with Colin Peters were genuine. I stand by them. But it was never my intention to imply some disapproval of Colin himself or of your efforts to find happiness in his company. You deserve to be happy and I have no reason to suspect Colin’s motives. I do, however, have every reason to suspect my own.

I am much better at writing about the fictional feelings of fictional people than honestly expressing my own feelings. I am more at home in the relative safety of the make-believe. In all of our years since India, that fact cannot have escaped you.

My current disaster of a project, Under the Waterberry, concerns the benevolent mayor of a massive, wealthy subterranean city called Underlin. Underlin citizens want for nothing except sunlight, for which evolution and technology have supplied a biochemically effective but emotionally unsatisfying substitute. The city is mostly self-contained. There are portals up to the Overlands, but they are carefully guarded to prevent discovery from above, the pillaging of Underlin’s many treasures and the corruption of Underlin’s strict egalitarian ideals. The primary narrative centers upon the Mayor of Underlin, who falls deeply in love with one of his own subjects (for they are really subjects more than citizens), an elite security operative who conducts dangerous reconnaissance missions up across the Overlands for information about nuclear military concerns, the nature of which I will mercifully spare you. The salient point is that the Mayor is hopelessly in love with his own spy and she is utterly oblivious of his feelings. She is oblivious because he has never let on. He has never let on because to divulge his feelings would compel him to act on those feelings, which would compromise the strict egalitarian ethic that governs his position and his life. For what is love, June, if not a vote of extraordinary preference for one person over all others?

Well, as you might guess (for this novel is not nearly as clever as I imagined it would be) the security operative finds herself attracted to the Overlander official she has been sent to deceive. Her excursions to the Overlands grow longer and longer and, eventually, the Mayor realizes what is going on in the sunlight above him. While the Mayor could have let her go, choosing her happiness over his own, he opts instead to hold her as a prisoner of Underlin. All sorts of drama and heartbreak ensue. I will withhold the rest of the plot on the slim chance that this mess of a yarn actually turns into a book that you can read and judge for yourself. It is intended to be a political allegory capturing the international conflict and ideological warfare that surrounds us these days and that you have so capably covered in your career.

Ordinarily, I would not have breathed a word of this to anyone, even you. You know too well my creative hermitages. But I share it with you now because when I read your letter, my hypocrisy lunged at me from between your words. I realized that I am the Mayor of Underlin, willing to sacrifice the happiness of the one I love to keep her close. I am no better than the GDR, June, building a wall around you with my affections. The realization was monstrous, shredding my heart from the inside.

So, why then? It must be asked and it must be answered. For all of my pretensions, I am not immune to romantic love. I do my best to deny it. To push those feelings away. It helps me to escape down into my writing. I am not accountable for my feelings in those other imagined worlds. But here, in this world, I am accountable, and I realize now that I am in danger of wounding someone, the only one, who truly matters.

From the first moment, June, at the hospital, long before you ever opened your eyes, I have loved you. I have spent every day since then trying to parse that word, love, into all of its niggling shades of meaning. I have hidden my feelings in words like friendship and collaborator and savior and admirer. Even sister for a time. I honestly do not know whether I have been successful in that deception or whether you have seen my shoes sticking out from beneath the curtain of these inaccurate descriptors. The ugly, shameful truth is that I have always wanted you for myself. The ardor that you now express for Colin Peters has, in the depths of my childish imagination, always belonged to me even if only in some unknown future. His gain has become my loss. I know that is not precisely true, and yet my feelings have made it true. It is very difficult for me to see it any other way. I am happy for you and I am devastated. I feel as if I cannot breathe.

I should have told you, of course. I should have been more candid. But that assumes I knew my own mind and had the courage to explain it. I did not know my own mind and I had no courage. It was easy enough to extoll the all-encompassing virtues of friendship as though I was laying everything out on the table. You have forgotten, but the bit about romance blossoming at the end of the long stem of a great friendship was mine, not yours. You repeated it willingly enough, but I was steering you, building my wall around you, even then.

So I did not leave everything on the table. My pockets were full. In retrospect, I told you almost nothing of my feelings for you. You seemed so indifferent to the multitudes of men who crossed your path, I was able to believe what I wanted to believe. You and I were the same, I told myself. I felt safe.

Then along came Colin. You are to be his wife and have his children and live a life of which he is justly the center. It is all so sudden, June. My happiness for you is a thin voice in a raging storm. I am sorry. I cannot attend your wedding. I will not give you an excuse. I am not strong enough. I will only poison the happy occasion. Do not worry about me. Please do not call. I do not wish to break our pact in that regard. I will do my best to resolve these feelings and I promise I will not spend your wedding day cooped up in this tiny hole staring at the man across the alley. I will change my scenery. I will take a trip. I think I will go west. I have never been out west.

It is my practice never to reread a letter before I send it. It only invites doubt and a self-conscious urge to tear up the words and start again that is anathema to the art of letters. Having violated that rule and reread this particular letter, I am consumed with pity and self-loathing. I am making everything worse. You are right about me, June. I am a blue whale. I can hold my breath a very long time. Your news having brought me to the surface long enough to write this wretched letter, all I crave now, suddenly, is the familiarity of solitude. So I will dive again. Back to my own personal Underlin. The only question is whether I will take this letter with me into the depths.

You are everything to me, June. When you read this lett——

________________________________________________________________________

November 2, 1963

June Cale
c/o The London Times
Correspondent Mail Service
1 Pennington Street
London E98 1XY

Dear June:

I have received your letter of October 20. First of all, allow me to apologize profusely for my last letter. I can be so ridiculously over-protective if you let me. But I do trust your instincts and if you say that Colin Peters is the one, then he is the one and I am ecstatic at the news. You must tell him, however, that – notwithstanding his obvious success – I am still of the firm opinion that there is a better way to meet women than running them over with a taxi. I hope Colin will allow me, Aunt Katja, to teach his new child at least that much.

I would love to attend your wedding, if for no other reason than to see you dressed in white chiffon standing in the middle of a church. The sight is almost too incongruous to imagine, and, as you know, there is almost nothing that I cannot imagine. Unfortunately for me, and I think fortunately for you, I have made plans to travel west for two weeks starting on the fifteenth. Mostly a change of scenery, I have never been out west, but I also have plans to see an old friend of my father’s in Dallas on the day you are to be married. I hope you are not disappointed, but I suspect you will get on just fine without me. I do expect a detailed account of the wedding and honeymoon that is worthy of your profession.

You have asked, once again, for details about my book-in-progress. When will you ever learn? Not so much as a single character name until it is done (and it may never be done).

Cheers June, to you and your Colin. I thrive less on my own dull existence than on your penchant for so fearlessly embracing what, and who, you love in the world.

All my best,

Katja

________________________________________________________________________

November 21, 1963

K.P. Sorenson
1024 W. 109th Street, Apt. 7C
New York, NY 10025

Dearest Katja:

It was with such great relief that I received your letter of November 2. I honestly cannot fathom what has gotten into me these past few days. I have gone from calm and happy to a nervous wreck. I have lost sleep thinking that you have completely written me off as mentally unstable. I almost broke our pact and rang you up.

My thoughts and feelings are all such a jumble, Katja. My wedding is tomorrow and just to write those words on the page is enough to send me screaming through London like a bloody lunatic. I know that if you were here you would tell me that these are natural feelings; that I am just over-reacting to the impending pageantry of it all. You would be right, of course. I do love Colin dearly and to take his hand tomorrow will be among the happiest days of my life. I really do not doubt those things. You needn’t ring me up to convince me. It’s just the knee-knocking jitters of standing in a church wearing a white dress. Me, Katja, in a white dress! In a bloody church! This is utter madness.

There is also very bad news recently that I fear has made all of these otherwise normal jitters more powerful. My lovely friend from the BBC, Lester Moore, darling Les, has died. It pains me to think that I ever joked or rolled my eyes at his lack of courage. Les died in Saigon at the hands of unknown assailants. My contacts at the Times and the BBC do not know many details, but they know that it was ghastly and cruel. I received a letter from Les only two weeks ago, just after the coup and the assassination of Diem and Ngo. He said he had developed some strong army contacts and was getting some good information about those final days of the regime. He was writing to thank me for my help. He said he felt like a real reporter.

Poor Les. He was such a dear. I feel in some way responsible, Katja. I feel like I abandoned him in that place. Colin has tried his best to be a comfort, keeping my attention on happier thoughts. The wedding. The baby. He reminds me that I could not possibly have any accountability for Les, that I am no longer that kind of reporter and that I should focus on the future. He is right, of course. I can see that Colin will be the only one with any common sense in this marriage.

I must tell you this, Katja – and only you, for you are the only one who truly understands me – I dreamed last night that I was back in Viet Nam. I was looking for Les. I dreamed I found him on the street, broken and bleeding. I was wearing white and ripped off pieces of my clothing to staunch his wounds. He regained consciousness and I gave him water. I kissed him and he kissed me back. He accused me of whoring about while he was dying. We laughed. I felt so relieved for him. And for me.

When I awoke, for a moment before Colin stirred next to me in his bed, I felt disappointment. I wanted to crawl back into the dream. I remembered keenly what you have told me about how novelists so often want to curl up inside the make-believe worlds they imagine. Except that I felt as though I had been dreaming of the real world and that the waking world was fantasy.

I have just reread all of this blather. Try not to hate me for such an egregious waste of ink and paper. These feelings will pass and tomorrow it will all seem so silly. If I had any common sense I would tear it up and wait to write you a glowing, post-coital account of the happy occasion, cigarette hanging from my lips, as poor Colin lies in a snoring heap in some corner of our hotel room having narrowly escaped death-by-shagging, and as God looks on wondering how he could have ever sanctified this union. When next you hear from me I will be happy, spending unconscionable amounts of my new husband’s money on baby clothes (I think I am addicted to that, by the way), and thriving in matrimony under the name June Peters.

Alas, I no longer have any common sense, which I fear has taken its leave of me forever. Anyway, I know it is a mortal sin in your book to not send a letter once started and I would much sooner offend God than you, my dear Katja. So I will send you this wretched thing and ask you to forgive me for all of the silly drama. I know that as you read these words, I am a happily married woman and you are freshly back from your holiday out west. I’m sure you enjoyed it immensely. Did you do any riding? Of course you did. Silly me. How does one go to Texas and not at some point ride a horse? I hear that all of the taxis are horses, and that you will be arrested if you are not wearing a ten-gallon hat. I must visit some day.

I also hear that your President Jack will be passing through Dallas soon. I do hope you will be there to see him. If you happen to bump into him, I hope you will tell him I said “hello”. Tell him that I am to be married and will no longer be following him around the globe listening to him stir the geopolitical pot with his Boston accent and his naively idealistic sensibilities. Tell him that as much as I admire him (and I do) I am now covering the domestic front and he will have to do his best without me. Tell him we will always have Berlin.

Wish me luck, Katja. I adore you. Kisses,

June.

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