3:35 PM Tues 18 July 72 – in the air over the ocean
So tired I cried. Embarrassment around Bruce only makes me cry harder. “Airport tax”, $4 coffee, it all makes me cry. Hideous. Wanted to buy Grand Marnier for my parents but it was more expensive than in Spain so I wept over that. Apologize to B: just “stupid.” Getting a little tired of Agatha, Dignified duchesses keep reaching into their beaded bags for revolvers and uttering “streams” of “foul abuse”. What abuse, exactly? Couldn’t you be more specific? Simenon never falters. Tried reading Helen MacInnes Message from Malaga but couldn’t get halfway through. Utterly meretricious. Ashamed for her. Bruce looks up from the boring Love Machine (he wants to know how write a bestseller) to have an embarrassingly braggy conversation with a total stranger. Total one upsmanship. I can’t see what gratification it gives to blather on in a slightly mendacious way to someone you’ll never see again. Bruce argues to me that a writer should be a chameleon and melt into the locale until invisible. Isn’t this a contradiction? I think there’s greater pressure to conform on males than on females. I really liked Dorothy Haynes’ story The Head. In the midst of the grossest viciousness, the discovery that love and immortality are indissolubly linked. Love is the passionate discovery. A fresh universe revealed. Thinking about Mary McCarthy’s article in New Yorker – as fast as Calley and his men were killing people at My Lai Colburn & Thompson were rescuing them. Pewter Hill – Sat-Sun night 22 July 72 Feeling sad and frustrated as I always do when Bruce falls asleep before I come. I lie awake thinking of Toss Sheffield of all people. The one who got away. The one I failed to impress. Last night in the midst of a thunderstorm Dixie gave birth to nine puppies. We watched the whole thing. In the morning one was dead and another was gone – Dixie must have eaten it. Full family dinner argument about homosexuality becomes about whether people can learn tenderness if they are born without it. Mom steadfastly insists it’s buried in there somewhere but has been mangled by “bad experiences”. Fails to explain Richard Speck, however. Well, he must have been “insane”. Loving Celia Fremlin – The Hours Before Dawn and Possession. The pervasive sense of threat and or poor equipment to cope. Want to read everything she’s written. She’s a missing spice – I plan never to go without again. (Bruce doesn’t see it at all.) Prisoner’s Base has a mess of an ending, The Troublemakers her all-around best story. Possession a bit mangled (glad there’s room for me.) Bruce reading Gabriel’s How to Write for Money. He says I need to set up a card index filing system. I cab just see me toting that around. Bruce wants to go on tour with Cory; I want to buy a country house and stare slack jawed into the “middle distance”. Bruce says I can’t go (but would I want to? Doughnuts, French fries and truck stops; the Superfluous Female.) I superstitiously feel that if we spend more than one night apart we will we lose the capacity to recognize each other. Bruce says why can’t I be the same kind of wife as Cory’s Shoshanna. Is this the approaching “sacrifice” Mom is always muttering about? I always thought “sacrifice” was a “thing” – what if it’s a person? Most specifically, me? Good idea for a story. Tues. 2 Aug 72 So desperate I am reduced to using ballpoints. Ugh! Another fabulous writer – Elizabeth Fenwick. (Friend of Mary Rose, Disturbance on Berry Hill.) She’s not as good as Fremlin but she’s very good. Gives one furiously to think, says Hercule Poirot. She’s not quite “big” enough. She wants her tales to fit unremarked inside a larger pattern. It’s a pleasure just thinking about how to “open up” those stories. So much work for me to do. Mary McConnell’s Open then the Door (sadly stupid title from sadly stupid quote) is the diary of a person going slowly insane. Interesting. Ever since Turn of the Screw, haven’t we all adored the Untrustworthy Narrator? Midge Turk’s Buried Life even better if what you want is mental illness. Seems like a process of narrowing down. That would make mental health a process of “opening up”. Without fear, presumably? Sounds crazy to me! Became convinced that the problem between Bruce and me is these two damn twin beds “pushed together”. We can have sex but not lie in each other’s arms. Took him down to Auntie B’s empty chamber – big, clean bed, what bliss! I wonder if other “psychological problems” have real physical causes. Rereading Devon’s love letters is probably not good for me. I don’t talk about Devon to Bruce and Bruce doesn’t talk about his first wife. (They ran away at eighteen- the marriage was annulled.) But Bruce thinks love is “in people’s heads”. Well, duh! But he means that dismissively as in “not a real thing.” People decide to be in love, they decide to not be in love. This is not what you want to hear your husband of seven months say. And it’s not what Devon says… “Ever since Elvira Madigan your eyes are the eyes I see with…” He can say in letters what he couldn’t say to my face. Wishing I had it to do over. If he had just gradually stopped writing from South America that would have been one thing. His last words were, wait for me, don’t forget me, remember me – then he flew from Logan with seven sets of skis. Then silence. Creepy. I think the difference between us is he assumes he can’t have what he wants. Takes that for granted. I think I can. So many things I didn’t tell him – like I knew he had an ulcer and was taking pills. Like I knew his friend asked for a threesome (Devon said no. But he didn’t tell me – the friend did.) How could we lie in each other’s arms all night and not talk? Stupid, stupid, stupid. He was invited to my wedding but didn’t answer. I pretended it was Mom who was inviting him. I wonder what I would say to him now. He asked to read my diaries – I actually regret saying no. If he had read them would he have loved me more – or less?
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Alysse Aallyn
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