Once a year the same letter is born from the flames. Tod sits there, direly staring at the grate, and watches the fire’s rumor of bared throats and wagging tongues. His larynx gives the complicated click of nausea. Into Tod’s mind, of course, I cannot see. But I am the hidden sharer of his body. What’s it going through? This: a torment, an outright sepsis of the lowest fear. And relief—ignoble relief. Then the letter unbuckles, turning from black to even white in the heat and delivering itself into our outstretched hand.
The letter always has the same thing to say. Yes, it’s rather the kind of correspondence one might expect Tod Friendly to go in for: unvarying, humorless, and one-way, like junk mail. It has this to say:
Dear Tod Friendly:
I hope you are well, as we are. It pleases me to inform you that the weather here continues to be temperate!
Yours sincerely.
Then the hysterical signature, under which the following name and title is complacently typed: The Reverend Nicholas Kreditor. “Here” (where the weather is ever temperate) is New York, according to the letterhead—more specifically the Imperial Hotel, on Broadway.
And that’s it. All the letters get from me is an annual gasp of inanition. But Tod comes on as if New York were next door, and as if temperate weather meant rat showers and devil winds and the mad strobes of Venusian lightning.
He’ll sit there by the fire for a long time, with scotch bottle, with alerted chemistry. In the morning, we’ll leave the letter on the mat with all the other trash, and it will go away, like Tod’s fear.
How will he take it if the weather in New York turns really bad?
It is significant, I am assuming, that nearly all our love affairs come to an end in the consulting rooms of Associated Medical Services. A professional formality prevails as we stand there with one or another of our girlfriends, against a background of height and weight graphs, nutrition rosters, scan and smear tips, and signs saying things like Do You Have Endometriosis? Don’t Panic. Nothing much happens, physically, except for some brow-touching and pulse-taking. Oh yes: Tod does his minor violence with the pins: “Any numbing?” Our girlfriends seem to enjoy the charade, at least to begin with; they are flirtatious and collusive. I think it must be Tod’s questions that eventually put them off. “How long have you been married?” “Is your husband an active man?” “Do you lead a … do you lead full life?” Our girlfriends never lead full lives. They all claim, rather hurtfully, to lead empty ones. Anyway these questions go down like a lead balloon.
Or maybe it’s simpler than that, and has to do with their seeing Tod in his natural environment, the doctor, the gatekeeper, with his white coat and his black bag. Our lady friends back out of here forever, with rewritten faces, pausing beyond the closed door and softly knocking, softly knocking, on love’s coffin.
Still, there are plenty more where they came from. You find them all over. In the House of the Big One, in Alright Parking, in bars, in doorways on rainy nights, sometimes sca ved and swaddled against the wind and the cold, sometimes naked in strange apartments.
So it’s almost total, this immersion in the bodies of others. And bodies are nice, are they? Is that what I’m supposed to think? Yes, well, okay—they are nice. They forgive everything. When they’re old. They can’t judge. Irene, whose white voluminousness forgives everything. She says as much.
“You don’t want to know,” Tod whispers in the dark, before he dreams.
“Whatever it is, I could forgive it.”
“You don’t want to know,” Tod whispers.
She doesn’t want to know. I don’t want to know. No one wants to know.
And then there is our own body, our own corporeal instrument, which we’re awfully proud of now. The bobbly briskness of our stride. My, the clarity and attack of our bowel movements. How perfectly we function. . . . It’s hardly surprising, I suppose, that the ladies go for us in a big way and come across so quickly, with our impassive oblong of a face, our clean and powerful hands. If you like the type, and though I say it myself, Tod is incredibly handsome. . . . This body: his pride in it, I firmly speculate, is connected to the fear that someone might hurt it—might mutilate or demolish it. Now why would anyone want to go and do a thing like that? Doctors may want to; but Tod doesn’t use doctors; he doesn’t go near doctors. “You don’t want to listen to doctors,” he tells Irene, coming as close as he ever does to talking and smiling at the same time. “They’ll try to get their knives in you. Don’t ever let them get their