After weeks with a sour twist in my gut. The building is freestanding and even after a half hour you can feel the sun moving around it and changing the angles of all the shadows.
Trader and Jennifer, they had two bureaus, two work stations, in the living room, not ten feet apart. On his desk there is a sheet of typing paper with stuff like this written on it:
p(x) = ao + ai x + a2 x2 + a3 x3 +…
On her desk there is a sheet of typing paper with stuff like this written on it:
x = 30/20m = 3 x 1022 m.
And you think, Hey. He heard her. She heard him. They talked the same language. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want? The peer lover, ten feet away: Silence, endeavor, common cause. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want? For him a woman in the room. For her a man in the room, ten feet away.
I popped the blue trunk.
It contained nine photo albums and nine ribboned bundles of letters—all of them from Trader. This is their history, illustrated and annotated. And of course ordered. Ordered especially or ordered anyway? With a premeditated suicide there is generally some kind of half-assed attempt “to put things in order”: To attempt completion. To try for completion. But I didn’t get that vibe here, and figured that the Trader “shrine” had been up and running since year one. I hauled it all out and got myself down there on the rug. Starting at the beginning: His first letter, or note, is dated June 1988:
Dear Ms. Rockwell: Forgive me, but I couldn’t help noticing you on Court Two this afternoon. What a beautiful all-court game you have— and what a toreador backhand! I wonder if sometime I could prevail upon you to give me a game, or a lesson. I was the dark-haired, bow-legged hacker on Court One.
And so it proceeds (“That was quite a set of tennis!”), with little memos about lectures and lunches. Soon the album is taking up the story: There they are on the court, individually and then together. Then complication. Then complication falling away. Then sex. Then love. Then vacations: Jennifer in a ski suit, Jennifer on the beach. Man, what a bod: At twenty, she looked like a model in an ad for those cereals that taste great but also make you shit right. Bronzed Trader at her side. Then graduation. Then cohabitation. And still the handwritten letters keep coming, the words keep coming, the words a woman wants to hear. No dashed-off faxes from Trader. Faxes, which fade in six months, like contemporary love. No scrawled reminders propped against the toaster, such as I get from Tobe. And used to get from Deniss, from Jon, from Shawn, from Duwain. GET SOME TOILET PAPER FOR CHRIST SAKE. That wouldn’t do for Jennifer. She got a fucking poem every other day.
Complication? Complication fell away, and did not recur. But complication there certainly was. Its theme: Mental instability. Not hers. Not his. Other peoples. And I have to say that I was very, very surprised to see my own name featuring here…
I prepared myself for what they’re now calling a “segue.” But a lot of this stuff I already knew. The dumped boyfriend. The freaked-out flatmate. The trouble begins at the outset, when Trader starts getting serious. There’s this jock, name of Hume, who has to be eased out of the picture. Big Man on Campus can’t take the strain. So what he does is present Jennifer with the spectacle of his collapse. Et cetera. Then the other problem, unconnected to this or to anything else in the outside world: A roommate of Jennifer’s, a girl called Phyllida, wakes up one morning with black smoke coming out of her ears. Suddenly this nerdy little chick is either gaping at the bathroom wall or out there howling at the moon. Jennifer can’t cope with being around her, and bolts, back to the Rockwell home. And who does she find there, stinking up her brother’s bedroom and babbling at the pillows, but Detective Mike Hoolihan. “Jesus Christ,” Trader quotes her as saying, “I’m surrounded.”